Awarded automatically the first time your best kill streak (kills without dying) crosses each medal's threshold. Central and Allied pilots earn different medals for the same streaks; the top honor — the Order of Merit — is universal.
The original 1999 SimGuild game awarded medals at kill-streak milestones — the Order of Merit is confirmed by the 1999 COMBATSIM interview with SimGuild, and the game's message-wire format has a dedicated medal category alongside kill/damage/battle/chat. A small character appended to the callsign changed as the streak crossed each tier. The medal names below match the well-known WWI historical medal precedence; the exact original kill-streak thresholds and the callsign-character mapping are still an open decode target — see the status page.